Yes, this is a very annoying bug for everyone. I believe it was introduced in maintenance last year, but I just haven't identified what is going on... Bitdefender seems to greatly exacerbate this situation (like 100x more likely), but it isn't required, thus I believe the core issue is likely a bug in Lasso. I have never seen it in NT6+, though had one user report with Bitdefender they had it happen in Win7 (iirc).
I tried to get a crash dump of this issue a few months ago, but it turned out to be crashing outside Lasso's code, in an injected module. EDIT: Well, actually it was deadlocking, very unhelpful.
You *might* try turning off the process icons. Shell extensions sometimes want to draw overlays on top of them, and some of those extensions I've seen crash. They manifest as a crash of Lasso, but it's really their DLL mapped into Lasso. When the icons aren't shown, it's not an issue. However, I do believe this is distinct from the issue here.
What I'll do is make another run at this in 8.0.2. I really don't do as much testing in XP as I used to, and never use BD, so don't see this often like affected users do.
If worse comes to worst, I'll find it during v9 beta work, and when I've discovered the problem, back-port the fix immediately.
Mitigation is the obvious other path, but the problem is the way in which this bug manifests. I need to do live debugging to see what I believe is a deadlock somewhere. There is unfortunately no way for me to detect when Lasso's system tray icon is actually missing.
If all else fails, I can automate the 'recovery' of Lasso until I fix the issue.
Please hold for further guidance, I am going to take care of this once and for all, one way, or another.